Re: Disk Performance

[Stefan Smietanowski <stesmi@stesmi.com>]

Hi.

> Why does my 40 Megabyte per second IDE drive, transfer files at best at 1-2
> Megabytes per second? Can anyone prove that this must be the case? What is
> the most efficient way to convince anyone who reads this that it can't be
> proven because a counter example exists?
> 
> I wish to be personally CC'ed the answers/comments posted to the list in
> response to this posting.
> 
> This is my first attempt at being part of the process. Please give me some
> time to adjust.

40Megabyte per second you say. Well, if it benchmarks at 1-2 Megabytes 
per second it sounds like a 2 Megabytes per second drive to me, not a 40 
Megabytes per second drive.

But, to try to speed it up, make sure you're running with DMA mode enabled.

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx where x = number of drive (a=primary master, 
b=primary slave, c=secondary master, etc).

But, apart from that, if it indeed is a real problem, what's the name of 
the motherboard, chipset, hard drive, what linux kernel revision are you 
running and do you use any special patches or tricks with it?

// Stefan